Kenneth L Brigham

Our health care system is crippled by desperate efforts to prevent the inevitable. A third of the national Medicare budget--nearly $175 billion--is spent on the final year of life, and a third of that amount on the final month, often on expensive (and futile) treatments. Such efforts betray a fundamental flaw in how we think about healthcare: we squander resources on hopeless situations, instead of using them to actually improve health. In Predictive...